I think I should say at once that this is the last time I shall review Sein und Werden because I know I'm simply not the right person for the job, and can't do justice to the poetry or the 'odder' pieces, finding it difficult to distinguish between sheer nonsense and a true 'ism'...
"Bring Out Your Dead," a collection of ghost stories, and, on the flip-side, "Send in the Clowns," a section replete with some of the more gruesome types of clownish humor. It's certainly not for everyone, but then the idea behind underground journals like Sein und Werden is just that -it's not your mama's mainstream literature. And for that, we applaud the journal.
What strikes a new reader is the variety and richness on offer. There are 20 writers, artists and poets featured, short stories, poems, novel excerpts and artwork all brought together in a dynamic collection. It is the raw energy, variety and intensity in the writing that kept me turning the pages.
Sein und Werden is getting better, wilder, more ambitious each time. This issue is a rough, relentless, perplexing, worthwhile collection of literary slaps... Get it while you can.
I believe this area of surrealist fiction is powerful in the publishing world. The ideas and concepts that SuW allow us to access, that they support and encourage, are those of gods. Self-made gods, sure, but gods none the less.
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Flicking through the pages of this publication it's obvious that a lot of thought has gone into the production and layout, with efforts to make it as interesting for the visual aspects as the written content. There are subtle differences from page to page - white text on black background and vice versa, pages with several items and those that have only one, some unadorned and others with borders - and yet despite all the variety a guiding intelligence is at work, so that the separate parts complement the whole perfectly.
Of all the genres, horror has consistently been the one that achieves its best effects through the distortion of "reality" (the one word in the English language, according to Vladimir Nabokov, that should always be encased in quotes). Her exploration of the exaggerating techniques of Expressionism and Surrealism is exciting and, as evidenced by this issue, worthwhile.
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"I think we're both agreed that SuW is a magazine that's carving out a path of its own and publishing material you won't find the likes of elsewhere, for which the editors deserve recognition."
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"This group of collaborative experiments are what you expect of any attempt to enter new territory: you stub your toe sometimes, but that's par for the course and there are so many interesting, scary and beautiful things around you soon forget it."
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"The appeal of Sein und Werden is its endearing punk, d.i.y. photocopied quality, a perfect anecdote to the current glut of pretty but mind-numblingly inane celebrity author obsessed journals... and, better yet, a nice compliment to their own website, which runs a whole other batch of similarly themed writing."
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"Sein und Werden is a magazine that takes risks and revels in being different. Certainly won't be to everybody's taste, but full credit to the editors for giving a home to quirky prose, poetry and artwork of this kind, and chances are if you're willing to take a chance on the magazine you will find something, probably many things, to delight and disturb, amaze and amuse, to challenge your expectations of what literature and art should be. Recommended."
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Energy. That is what comes off the Sein und Werden print version Issue 2, the doppelganger issue in which many of its stories fair crackle with the stuff. Even the magazine itself, the cover, the paper, the slightly rough-edged feel of the thing gives off a sense of immediacy, of you must read this now!
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"...But the discriminating reader (that old bastard) is certain to find something suited to their literary cravings in this diverse yet coherent issue, which sports the colours of a special brand of surrealism / existentialism."
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You will find in issues of Sein Und Werden magazine echoes of William Burroughs, of, I think I'm right, the Russell Hoban of Riddley Walker, and most definitely of Douglas Adams. Not derivative, note, but picking up, tuning into the most incisive voices of American writing, and the joyous exuberance of English, American/English.